Page 380 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Pol t cal Documentary: Fahrenheit 9/11 and the 2004 Elect on |

opinion in one way or another. But we might wonder, what film doesn’t do this?
Is any film—documentary or otherwise—devoid of messages and incapable of
influence? A better question to ask might be: what messages are produced by any
given film, and how are they meant to influence us? When the History Channel
produces a documentary explaining how President Reagan’s nuclear policy helped
to end the Cold War and protect America’s position in the world, we don’t often
think of this as a piece of “propaganda.” But when a documentary challenges that
perception, as Terri Nash’s antinuclear film If You Love This Planet did in 1982,
then it can be labeled propaganda, and often is—as was the case in this instance,
when the Reagan administration forced exhibitors to attach a propaganda warn-
ing label to every showing of Nash’s film. In fact, the real difference between these
films lies in the types of messages they are producing. As Combs and Combs
argue, a documentary that reproduces popular ideas and reinforces commonly
held values constitutes a kind of “deep propaganda” that remains hidden precisely
because the messages it puts forth are taken for granted by the culture at large.
But when a film openly challenges common values and understandings, as Nash’s
film did, its political commitments become more obvious.

ThE “TruTh” aBouT DoCumEnTary
If it is agreed that all documentary is, in essence, a form of propaganda, how
do we go about evaluating documentaries, in general? For many critics, the im-
portant question shifts from one about truth to one about honesty. As cultural
anthropologist Jay Ruby has put it, every documentary is “the interpretive act of
someone who has a culture, an ideology, who comes from a particular socioeco-
nomic class, is identified with a gender, and often has a conscious point of view”
(Ruby 2000, pp. 139–40). The problem is that most documentaries never own
up to this fact. Indeed, as Nichols points out, the structural aspects of documen-
tary form that we often take for granted—authoritative voice-overs and illustra-
tive visuals or long takes, a handheld camera and the use of available light and
sound—are actually stylistic conventions geared towards producing the appear-
ance of realism. In this way, the look, sound, and feel of documentary produces a
kind of “reality effect” that encourages us to accept what it says at face value.
Thus, many critics have praised documentaries that exhibit a more “reflex-
ive” style of filmmaking. Reflexive documentaries are films that call attention to
themselves as films by breaking with traditional documentary conventions. Re-
flexive documentarians often put themselves on screen, speak in the first person,
and admit what they have to say is their own opinion. In this way, rather than
being more “truthful,” reflexive documentaries are simply more honest about the
fact that all any documentary can do, in the end, is construct a particular inter-
pretation of “the truth.”

CasE sTuDy: FAHrENHEIT 9/11

All of these questions about documentary suddenly became very relevant in
the summer of 2004 when Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 opened. Moore had